I rarely ask questions here on Stack Overflow, but when I do I try to put as much thought and attention as I can into them.

Today I posted a question which attracted 2 almost immediate downvotes and sadly no feedback to indicate why that could have been. Fair enough, I thought, it must have just been a bad question.

A little while later a user edited my question to modify one of the tags from jest to jestjs. Lo and behold, I believe that is the reason why my question attracted 2 very fast downvotes.

I went back to the Ask Question form to find out if I'd blindly overlooked the fact that I'd used the wrong tag, but it seems there's nothing to indicate what each tag is for.

Typing in "jest", results in the usual tag dropdown:

...and then upon clicking the "jest" tag:

There's nothing here to indicate that jest is, from the tag's wiki excerpt, a Java HTTP Rest client for ElasticSearch and not the JavaScript testing framework I thought it related to.

Yes, I did notice the jestjs tag but figured it must be something else because I've never heard the JavaScript Jest referred to in that way (i.e. Jest.js).

Of course the negative reaction my post received could well be because it's a bad question. However I feel that as this was something myself as a relatively seasoned Stack Overflow user completely overlooked, I'm sure a lot of other less experienced users could also very easily fall into the same trap.

I have no issue with the jest and jestjs tags remaining exactly how they are. Instead I'm posting this question to ask: Should there be something more when asking a question to indicate what each selected tag's purpose is?

"Lo and behold, I believe that is the reason why my question attracted 2 very fast downvotes." - how can you be sure?
– jppAug 16 '19 at 14:31

@jpp I can't be 100% sure, but that's why I clarified near the end that it could have been downvoted for simply being a bad question. However both downvotes were received within 2 minutes of the question being asked and I don't think anyone could have clicked on and read it in its entirety that quickly, which is why I have a pretty strong reason to believe that's the most likely cause. The downvotes aren't really important here though.
– James DonnellyAug 16 '19 at 14:34

3

"and I don't think anyone could have clicked on and read it in its entirety that quickly" This is a common train of thought with one major flaw: One doesn't need to read a question in its entirety to see that it needs a downvote. Often, it's pretty obvious at a glance that a question is missing something, or deserves a downvote for another reason.
– CerbrusAug 16 '19 at 14:36

2

@Cerbrus perhaps I should have phrased this post differently. If users give downvotes for incorrect question tags, it should be clear what the tag is for when asking the question before it gets to that point. The downvotes here aren't important, they were just a preface to the question.
– James DonnellyAug 16 '19 at 14:40

Oh that's interesting, this appears to be a responsive thing. I usually have 2 monitors but one of them packed up recently so I'm using one monitor with my IDE taking up one half and my browser the other. With my browser at 1000px those tag descriptions do not display at all.
– James DonnellyAug 16 '19 at 14:47

That seems to be correct, but only if you load the page at that resolution... If you resize the page, it will still show / hide the descriptions, depending on the resolution on page load...
– CerbrusAug 16 '19 at 14:49

10

I wonder how many of the incorrect tag uses can be linked back to the hiding of tag descriptions. This needs to be fixed
– ZoeAug 16 '19 at 15:41

It seems to be a explicitndesign choice, though. How would you display the descriptions on a small screen?
– CerbrusAug 16 '19 at 16:09